Thursday, May 20, 2010

Paul Fact of the Day

Here's a fun fact about Rand Paul: our final poll before the primary last weekend found that there were more Kentucky Republicans who thought he was too liberal (17%) than that he was too conservative (12%). He seems to be doing his best to get those numbers turned around.

When we polled the general election in Kentucky earlier this month we found Paul leading Jack Conway just 41-40. Conway was actually winning 15% of the Republican vote against Paul, which is a pretty unusual level of crossover support for a Democrat this year. The only reason Conway didn't lead Paul is that he was getting just 63% of the Democratic vote to 21% for Paul and with 16% undecided. That's not particularly unusual- many of the registered Democrats in Kentucky are conservative and tend to vote for the GOP in national elections. But this contest will be an interesting test of just how far those Democrats are willing to go in voting for a Republican.

I expect this to be a very competitive race. But I also remember how little Bob McDonnell ended up being affected by some of the crazy stuff in his thesis last year. It's hard to say how Kentucky voters will react to all this.

I live in Virginia and am a Democratic activist here, and I can tell you there's no comparison between McDonnell and Paul.

McDonnell never volunteered anything controversial during the campaign. He was the textbook example of campaign discipline, and it took good journalism and oppo work to dig up the thesis hit. And his response was to consistently repudiate the impression it left of him. (He actually never repudiated some important points in it, such as his belief that married women should be stay-at-home, but clever dissembling and reliance on voters' cognitive dissonance helped conceal that fact.) Oh, and it was ONE thing, his attitude toward women, not enough on its own to wrap a whole message around it as Deeds foolishly tried to do.

Paul is anything but disciplined and is getting in trouble for stuff he has been saying RECENTLY AS A U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE. Paul has a LOT of looney extreme libertarian ideas that can be wrapped inside a broader message. He actually does a good job of hiding them to varying extents, enough so that even I wasn't aware of some of his extreme views, but he is the walking example of the OPPOSITE of "discipline," and there surely will be more material to exploit between now and November.

I think the most interesting thing about Kentucky right now is the surprisingly strong Democratic primary turnout. The big question is the party loyalty of Mongiardo voters. Surely there will be defections from some of those conservaDem voters in eastern Kentucky, but if the party unites sufficiently, then Conway will be in good shape assuming he raises the money he needs and develops a good message.

Oh, and regarding that Rasmussen poll, if you believe THAT, you're smokin' some strong weed.

There's these things called 'outliers.' If you do a poll with a 95% confidence interval, then you're confident that 19 out of 20 times you run a poll with X number of respondents, you'll get numbers that reflect reality, and that twentieth time something can be wonky. If a poll appears to show something that's wildly different from previous and expected results, it begs extra scrutiny until further polling either corroborates or disproves it.

Rand Paul's crazy views are starting to come out. Too bad he was able to hide them so well (no doubt with the cooperation of the media) during the primary.

If Paul's kooky views keep coming out and he loses the election because of it, the right thing to do would be for him to pay back every single contribution anyone made to his campaign. That's what a retailer has to do when he rips someone off, and that's what Rand Paul should do when it becomes clear that he ripped off his supporters by pretending to be the sane conservative he definitely is not.

"That's what a retailer has to do when he rips someone off, and that's what Rand Paul should do when it becomes clear that he ripped off his supporters by pretending to be the sane conservative he definitely is not."

Paul is extremely right-wing, about as conservative as you can get (well, until he was deballed by the NRSC and had to walk back his opinions and hem and haw and go off into irrelevant tangents about guns and William Lloyd Garrison and clowns and water polo). Even his foreign policy is right-wing; it's just not neocon.

P0litical issues in Kentucky for at least 17% of the population is abortion, because the 10 Commandments posted in every wall six feet of public buildings, and gays gettin what Comin to em. If you do not hate women's choices, people who spend six hours a week at the Baptist Church, and hoe-moe-sexual, you are a dirty librul commi in the Great State of Kentucky.